Categories

Recent Entries

Syndicate

2

Out of memory errors

Is your Eclipse install running super slow or crashing with OutOfMemory error:PermGen Space erros? This is an easy fix that will save you lots of frustration as well as compile time. There is a file called eclipse.ini. On the mac you will have to right-click the eclipse application and choose ‘show package contents’. From there the eclipse.ini is located in ‘Contents/MacOS/’. Below is my default eclipse.ini file. As you can see, the -Xms and -Xmx flags are pretty low.

Comments

Saw your article on XD and was interested to find that the responsiveness doesn’t really suffer if I reduce my settings to what you’ve suggested.

Because I use FDT for Flash development and had it demand that I increase my settings from the default, I decided that I’d go all out and up them to the max: like you, my machine has 4Gb of RAM and it made sense to use it.

So I tried various permutations - some of which made Eclipse crash on startup, despite being a fraction of what was available - until I hit upon the combination that seemed to be the theoretical maximum. It worked in as far as I could see that it was gaily chewing up memory… but didn’t exactly seem to fly.

Having reduced the settings by 75% in most cases I’m finding that performance remains more or less what it was, but without killing the memory it used to.

Do you know of anywhere that gives some kind of definitive explanation of what the best settings might be? I’ve looked but there simply doesn’t seem to be one.

Thanks for the advice in any case.

Posted by Oliver on Apr 23, 2009

As with the rest of Coding Angry, I am writing on behalf of my best knowledge. The settings I posted are as high as I was able to get away with. Eclipse would crash before startup if I went any higher. What were the highest settings you were able to get away with and why did you wind up setting them lower?